


Yuletide changes

by Elf (Elfwreck)



Category: No Fandom, Yuletide - Fandom
Genre: Fandom, Gen, Imported Work, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally posted at Dreamwidth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-20
Updated: 2010-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:07:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23151430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elf
Summary: Yuletide is facing a choice: change or die. The mods can't run it the way it used to run; those methods barely worked with 500 participants and would utterly collapse with nearly two thousand. Exactly what needs to change, and what could be done with new shiny code and faster servers, has yet to be figured out.
Kudos: 1
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Yuletide changes

Yuletide's gotten *BIG*. Server-crashing big; annual wankfest big; coding nightmare big. It's gotten big because it's popular; almost everyone has a handful of beloved small fandoms they'd like to read or write in. Gotten big through inertia; people heard about it one year, looked at it the next, and by the time they decided they actually were interested, it was still around!

Some of the wank is about--is always about--what counts as a "small fandom." Yuletide may be forced to shift from "a small fandoms fic exchange" to "a small-at-AO3 fandoms fic exchange," in order to avoid the mind-numbing timesuck of "mods must manually check 4000+ requested fandoms against fanfiction.net's listings." (They could check by automation... if ff.net doesn't change their code. Or they could plan on re-writing YT code every year. I can understand that they'd really rather not.)

YT is facing a choice: change or die. The mods can't run it the way it used to run; those methods barely worked with 500 participants and would utterly collapse with nearly two thousand. Exactly what needs to change, and what could be done with new shiny code and faster servers, has yet to be figured out. They don't have time to manually decide which fandoms are small, and whatever criteria get established are going to include some "larger" fandoms & exclude some "smaller" fandoms, especially when compared to previous years. That changes the nature of the fest.

Adding more mods means adding time for communication; YT's too big for an extra two or three people to help (unless they have near-telepathic connections with the current mods), and adding an extra dozen means adding serious infrastructure. And more time. YT arrangements would almost have to start in August. Which would (drum roll….) change the nature of the fest.

Part of why (or at least *how*) YT works is the frantic holiday-season pacing, cramming all the decisions and writing into a small window packed with enthusiasm before the new year exhaustion sets in. Arranging mod staff in August to sort out who-does-what so they can announce rough eligibility criteria in late September and take nominations so they've got a few solid weeks to research all those fandoms to sort out what actually matches the criteria and normalize the list, then report it back to the fans, take feedback on what does/doesn't belong, so that by mid-October they're ready to announce impending signups, possibly to begin near the start of November so there's time to find pinch-hitters for dropouts… gah. YT changes from a month-and-change fest to an entire season. Not saying it couldn't work, but it'd be _different_.

Just like it'll be different if it uses AO3+user feedback as its only criteria for small fandoms. (And yeah, there's problems there. They've identified some; they're working on identifying more, and figuring out what to do about them.)

It's gotten too big to use the methods that used to work. (They didn't work. They scraped by. Every year was an exercise in polishing code and process against mod exhaustion levels.) It could refuse to grow—cut off fandom noms at 2500 fandoms, first-come-first-serve, and whittle the list down a bit ('cos there's always accidental duplicates, things that aren't eligible when it's discovered what they are, and so on), and cap participation at 750 people. That might put it in the range of "mods can check every fandom by hand to sort out if it's too big"—but it means a lot of people would miss out.

There is *no* way for Yuletide to "just keep going the way it's been going." There's "force it into what it was 3-5 years ago," or "create new arbitrary caps on some things." This year, the arbitrary cap was on "time we spend checking fandoms for eligibility."

I'm kinda boggled at some of what got in (Nolanverse?!), and I am not a broad-fandom person. I know there's anime and manga fans who are just *baffled* at what's been tagged as "small" based on "fandom has no presence at AO3 yet." And I can tell the new/current system has some bugs to sort out, even beyond "AO3 is small and has a skewed membership." But shrug. I'm a lot happier with "YT has some larger fandoms" (even some anime megafandoms, if that's part of it) than with "YT puts a limit on participants" or "YT limits number of fandoms" or "YT begins so early in the year that by the time we swap stories, everyone's forgotten the fest exists."

I love Yuletide. Love discovering new fandoms I'd never heard of (I've read all of [Oglaf](http://www.oglaf.com) over the last week), love watching the hippo dances in the chatroom, love the frantic rush of "I need a beta for a ficlet about a movie I'm sure only 12 other people on the planet have ever seen," love surfing the server waves on Dec 25 looking for fic in fandoms I'd never imagined anyone would write in. Love reccing "hey, even if you've never heard of this canon, this story is lovely, go check it out." Love the crackfic crossovers that get suggested; love the ones that actually get written.

I will love all these things even if YT is only based on AO3's numbers, and permitted fandoms change drastically every three years as past YT participation bumps some out of eligibility. Will love them even if it caps participation at half the current numbers. (Although I probably won't be able to participate then.) Will love them if the new criteria use some algorithm based on Wikipedia word counts as a measure of fandom popularity. Will love them if they use LJ polls to decide what is & isn't too big. None of those would be "fair"—but they'd keep the fest going.

I can't love them if Yuletide _stops_ , and so I am in favor of _whatever changes will let Yuletide continue_. Specific criteria are a lot less important to me than the basic theme ("small fandom fic exchange"). I don't care if they stay true to last year's interpretation of "small fandom." If Yuletide turns into "the AO3 small fandom fic exchange," I still like that a lot better than "Yuletide, the former small fandom fic exchange."

(My gods. Over a thousand words of Yuletide babble. I hope I find it half this easy to write my actual assignment.)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at <http://elf.dreamwidth.org/370782.html> where there are comments.


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